Translating Gerontology into Practice

It is also obvious that social contacts are an elixir of life, postponing the necessity of care, but we continue building retirement homes on the outskirts of cities or even villages instead of placing them in the more populated areas of the community. Epigenetic modification of the activity of age-associated genes, such as SIR1, by calorie restriction is a wellproven life-prolonging strategy. Again, such established gerontological facts do not seem to be recognized as a basis for political decisions involving our aging societies. I always wonder how meetings of governments may proceed. Are the politicians sitting around the table really not aware of the progress made by gerontologists dealing with different issues from molecular biology through economy, sociology, architecture, public traffic, demography and nutritional sciences to diabetology, oncology, etc.? Why can they not apply facts that were established already a decade ago to societal reality? Why can decision makers from one country not implement strategies to cope with the aging issue that have been successfully applied in other – even neighbouring – states? Could it be that we, the gerontologists, fail to ‘sell’ our findings to the public and the stakeholders who actually are also the supporters of our research via their tax? This would require our more active participation in the discourse on issues of aging outside the proper scientific realm of gerontology. I also deem it important to team up with journalists and artists who look at the issue of aging from a broader, less focussed viewpoint than we as specialized scientists do and are able to translate scientific facts into public language more strikingly and condensed than ourselves. In order to translate a text from one language into another, the translator has to master both languages and must also be able to read between the lines to decipher subtle meanings that may escape the non-inaugurated. Since aging affects everybody and constitutes a major – if not the most important – personal, medical, socioeconomic and political problem of our time, translation of basic gerontological knowledge into practical application would seem to be a self-understood issue for all societies. However, similar to other fields of daily life, one has the impression – at least, in the developed world with high scientific standards – that the discoveries and fact-based reasoning of gerontologists working in different basic and applied fields of our discipline do not seep into the brains of decision makers. This is even true in those instances where complex scientific data have been pre-processed into a simple and compressed format that is deemed to be comprehensible and not very time consuming for politicians, health officials, managers, etc. [1] . Thus, it is an established fact that smoking is a major life-shortening health hazard, but – with the exception of the USA – anti-smoking campaigns are pre-empted when smoking is not prohibited in all restaurants and official buildings. Also, the evident increase of life expectancy endangers the security of pensions if retirement age is not hoisted as a logical consequence of solid demographic data. Interestingly, in my home country, Austria, women still retire 5 years earlier than men, even though their mean life expectancy is about 5 years above that of men. We also know, of course, that obesity is a life-shortening condition, but the obesity epidemic is spreading all over the world without any adjustments regarding insurance rates. Published online: December 21, 2013